The Return of the Grey

by Robert Lee Henry

  I could use his help now on something less important than the fate of humanity. I can not keep all this in my head. Nata flicked through files on the screen and pages in his notebook alternatively. ‘Gather all data; then proceed with your evaluation.’ That had always been Elsewise’s advice. Messages received over the past few days indicated that the Rim had reached a critical phase. Whichever way it went, the Scholar would return soon. Nata wanted to have this study complete, or at least in better form. Neither he nor Celene had advanced beyond the notion of a House conspiracy. ‘Hit or miss’ Elsewise would say of what they had done, and he would be right.

  Since their return from Arborne, Nata had worked diligently assembling information. His enquiries had been exhaustive, at least that is what the techs told him. He would have the data.

  He reached the last page of his notebook before he was halfway through the files. He concentrated on the latter. Duty records, movements. He could not find a connection between Donen and PlanCon. There must have been contact in order to control him. But the caretakers kept to themselves and Donen’s previous duties had been off world. Perhaps it was through a third party. Nata let that thought ride and continued. He was into lists from factored searches now. Second cousin twice removed, that sort of thing. A name caught his eye. Crell.

  Donen had been needled. Aesca had discovered that in her scans. One more casualty added to the short list of confirmed cases. Crell was not on that list but he was on a subsidiary, that of ‘associates’ of those needled. Crell was on this list three times. That is what caught my eye. So much for my astuteness. Crell had served under Commander Wiles and with one of the other victims. Nata opened his notebook. He knew what was there, in the first list. Crell was a caretaker.

  Nata’s mind wanted to jump forward but he schooled himself to continue with the lists.

  Crell again, this time accompanied by Serin, another of the caretakers, on a list of ‘participants in incidents of aggression requiring disciplinary action or note’. Incidents like the fight at Armitage’s. Alizane and Trahern were both listed, well up on the list actually. From the dates, their indiscretions were mainly from the early period of their careers, a time of unofficial testing, a macho sorting the men carried out themselves. Crell had been constant, a main offender for years. Serin was close behind. Until a sudden drop nine months ago. Both had gone quiet.

  Nata could not stop his mind this time. That is when they went in the Box, became caretakers. They have been there three tours, at least. Someone in command has protected them, altered records. Not these two alone, all the caretakers.

  He typed in the names and initiated a search for lists carrying the full set. The program ran. He waited. It should not be taking this long. When the list of hits started scrolling up he saw his mistake. The search had gone into the whole system. He had not directed it to his assembled files. Cursed logical thing.

  He went to cancel but stopped when he saw the headings. Many avenues he had not thought to check. Many possibilities that their protector may have also missed. He added a vetting, to limit results to lists with less than five hundred names. Otherwise he would get all the business of Base. The register shrunk.

  Their current posting to the Box came up, and after it, related mess, accom and supply details, transport schedules, tool assignments. Only for one tour. Perhaps I am wrong. A thousand details would have had to be found and changed. No. Curse these machines and those that use them. All that would be necessary would be to substitute names, a one-off machine replace at the end of each tour. Done over the whole system, at command.

  His discipline held him. One punch has been blocked, that’s all. Continue the attack. Elsewise would have barely started. Nata entered the Supply file, copied the details of the outfitting. Then he called up the previous tour. The measurements were the same although the names were different. Same result for two tours back. He went one further. One set of measurements was the same. He checked them against the first list. Serin. This started with Serin. Somehow.

  Nata scrolled back to the register. Enough for me. Elsewise would check stores requests, utility usage and mess records, to establish personal patterns and trends, even down to computing favourite foods and how often they were eaten, then match this over the tours. A thousand details would become a million. But he can do that in minutes. I am only a poor would-be scholar with a mind that fills up with a choice of noodles. His stomach rumbled. He had worked through the dinner period and it was now late in the night.

  There were only a few more lists in the register. He ran them. ‘Twice in the Box’. He had that in his own notebook. ‘Major surgery’. He had noted that aspect also. It had not seemed unusual. Box duty was for those impaired or recovering. ‘Amputees.’ There were subsidiary lists to go with ‘Amputees’, schedules for fitting checks, maintenance of prosthetics. If I go back two tours I will find the wrong names in those schedules. He didn’t bother, but he did appreciate Elsewise’s advice. It is all here, in the details.

  The last list galvanised him. Trolled out of the system by his mistake. Six names in a program that passed instant notice to command if inquiries were made of any of them. To a coded receiver. Find that and we find their protector. His mind jumped back to a previous list. There was a name there that sat in the command structure.

  I must warn Celene. Now. Not on the comm. That would be monitored. He slowed his thoughts. She will be in Med. A long curve of the wall separated them. I will go via the plain. It will be quicker. He felt the need to be moving. His inquiries would have been logged.

  CHAPTER 86: CELENE, THE FOOL

  Celene had always thought of herself as separate. Dedicated to the Guard, but on her own terms. Not like the others. Yet here was proof that she was wrong. It is in all of us.

  Twice, as they walked back to Med, Jared stopped them to listen. She did not pick up his wariness, caught up in her internal turmoil. I knew what I gained when I joined the Guard. What have I traded away? The Box was only supposed to be a test.

  She had rooted out her own conditioning, applied all the skills of her calling, savagely, painfully. She had devoted hard years to it. To become clean. To become free. Only to submit blindly to another set? I am a fool.

  What are we being prepared for? What else have they done to me here?

  Jared pulled her up a third time. Bright light shone out through the entrance to Med. She wanted to go in but he held her.

  ‘Wait.’

  A figure moved into the light from the side, peered through the glass into Med then pulled back. Again it came into the light. A man in the colours of Supply. This time he moved right across in front of the doors. Face and hands went to the glass. The head turned to search the descending stairwell on the inside to the left then came back to focus on the inner doors to the main corridor.

  Only small windows about head height, Celene knew. He will have trouble seeing through those.

  The man gave up. Backed away and turned, shaking his head. There was something small in his hand. He glanced down to it then back to the entrance.

  ‘Let’s go,’ whispered Jared. He passed the bag of small sensors to her. ‘Don’t stop. I will handle him.’

  Their footsteps brought the supplyman’s head up when they were close. He stepped to the side away from the doors but not out of the bright light. His hand came up then down again. ‘Specialist,’ he said and nodded.

  She swept past, ignoring his greeting and his beseeching look. His shoulders sunk and he half turned, to be lifted off his feet and slammed up against the glass by Jared.

  Celene stopped at the inner doors. The one-eyed marine spun the supplyman through the outer doors, arms crossed and held high behind his back.

  ‘Wait! Wait! I can’t go in there. She’ll kill me.’

  Celene motioned to Jared to stop and ease.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘She has thrown me out twice already. If she sees me again I don’t know what she will do.’

  It s
poke volumes for Aesca that this young man was more afraid of her than the fearsome marine holding him.

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked Celene.

  ‘I have a message for La Mar, from the Rim. It has to get to her.’ He hung his head. ‘I thought that it would be easy.’

  ‘Messages come through proper channels. What is this?’

  ‘This was special. Hand to hand, they said. From Bethane to La Mar.’ He said the names with awe. ‘Barry’s mark is on it. That means it’s true. I mean that it is real.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He managed to look affronted, incongruous as this was in his position. ‘We would never open it.’

  ‘What happened in Med?’ asked Celene.

  ‘I was inside, asking the aides for directions when she came up behind us.’

  She is not going to get a name, realised Celene. How does Aesca loom so large in these men’s minds?

  ‘‘Back to work,’ she told them. And ‘Out’ she said to me. Didn’t give me a chance to explain. I tried again later but she saw me from a distance and I ran. Doesn’t she ever sleep?’ he complained.

  ‘And you came around to this side to try again?’

  ‘Umm, yes. But I don’t dare.’ He met her eyes with the openness of a little boy. ‘I’m stuck. It is supposed to be handed over as quickly as we can. If I take it back now, someone else will get to deliver it tomorrow.’

  And you lose you place in the story. Something that almost makes you willing to try the dragon’s den a third time.

  ‘Commander La Mar is sleeping. She needs this rest. She has not recovered as much as she would like everyone to believe. She can not be disturbed.’ Celene held out her hand. ‘I can pass on the message when she wakes. This will be the soonest it could arrive under any circumstances. If you trust me to complete this hand-to-hand enterprise, that is.’ She raised her eyes to Jared’s one and passed a command to release the young man.

  The supplyman brought his arms forward, exhaling his tension on the accompanying breath. ‘Phew.’ One arm continued, lifting to offer her a small object. ‘Here it is, M’am.’

  A capped metal tube, like the thing Quartermaine carried his salt and pepper in, but longer and single chambered. Celene turned it in her hand. Faint scratches on the side resolved into letters. A stylised ‘B’ then a dash, then another letter, and so on for six entries. ‘You should put your mark on this.’ She handed it back to him.

  His mark was a ‘K’. The fine scratches reminded her of Lammas’ desktop. Almost a cross. Enough of this foolishness.

  She slid the tube into her front hip pocket. ‘Return to your friends. Have your people contact La Mar on one of her walks tomorrow to see if she wishes to reply in the same manner.’ That should complete this epic to their satisfaction.

  She passed the bag to Jared. ‘Take these to the ward. Set one up for Leguizamo. And anyone else that thinks they need one. Show the aides what you are doing.’

  ‘But you -’ started the marine.

  ‘I will be downstairs in the psych room.’ There were records she needed to check. Not least among them her own. She had the feeling that it was going to be an unpleasant night.

  CHAPTER 88: FIRST BLOOD

  They have separated! She goes to the room below. Alone! The elation Visco felt was tempered by what he saw developing in the corridors outside.

  The supplyman had chosen a narrow side corridor to make his way across the storage section. A brave choice at this time of night. No light except at those points where it intersected major corridors. A lonely dark way to travel. The supplyman would know his way blindfolded through this section, however. He would not get lost. But that was not his problem. Crell was in there somewhere. And that makes it my problem also.

  Visco’s fingers were quick on the keys. He could only track the supplyman’s progress intermittently. Luckily the spacing between corridors was regular. There he is. A count of twenty. There. Twenty. There. Twenty, twenty-one … by thirty he knew that Crell had struck. I must go!

  He added the feed from the monitors on the corridors between command and Med to those he already controlled. Security would not notice. The hundreds of monitors in the walls could not be viewed simultaneously. This late at night they were set to a schedule with an auxiliary program running to break in if excessive motion was detected. His program over-road and substituted. Once their business was complete it would erase itself.

  He directed all the caretakers to Crell’s location. ‘Remove the body and all trace. They must not know that we have been inside. Then wait for me. We will make the move on the Specialist together.’ Without his control this could turn out like the last time, especially now that Crell was blooded. The action had to occur outside, on the plain, at the grav platform.

  He closed his screens, made his way quietly out of command then ran.

  CHAPTER 89: THE ATTACK

  On my own terms, repeated Celene to herself. The Armourer thought he was here on his own terms. Where is he now?

  That, she would have accepted, an order from Quartermaine. A life to be spent. That was what was owed for atonement. That was the agreement. But knowingly, not under some hidden compulsion that reduced her to less than a dumb animal.

  The Heartless Cross was there on her Box record, along with several of the others. The St Johns, the Hang Sen, the Scarred Cross. Have these others added something of their own? I will remove it all. Her anger transformed into resolve. I must understand them to do that.

  Celene pulled up Lammas’s results. Similar to her own. But only one record, from his first time in. The second was under another name and she did not have the correlating list.

  Trahern. His records were complete. Three times in the Box. The last record, retrieved from the Scholar at her insistence, carried the full array of crosses. Or did it? We don’t know that, do we? There could be more. These records need to be studied. We are fools to submit ourselves to something we do not understand.

  She tried to find a pattern in his earlier attempts but in each case the crosses appeared in different combinations. The six-rayed cross was missing from the first record. The Infinity Cross only appeared on the third. He was trying different routes; that’s all. Amazing.

  Even before his experience in the deep, he was unique. Celene lifted her head from the screen. I wonder what Briodi made of him? Here, in this room, the young psych had achieved an intimacy with the Grey that was also unique. If only that relationship had been allowed to continue.

  A puff of cool dry air touched Celene’s cheek and she was assaulted with the image of Briodi’s torn body. So intense that she could smell the blood. No! I don’t want to remember that now. The scene in her mind changed to the rooftop the morning after Donen’s death. No bodies, but dried blood everywhere. Then to Donen’s corpse down in the morgue. Those smells and more, a charnel, decayed stink from his raggy blacks. Sewn that way, not torn. A purposeful modification. The clothes symbolic of the man’s mind. All the caretakers did it, she had been told.

  ‘The caretakers do it.’ Burnt Thomas’ words finally registered. All the caretakers! She turned to a noise in the corridor, a flutter of black and the flash of blue light.

  CHAPTER 90: THE PRIZE

  Crell ran with the woman clutched under one arm. She was small, easy to carry folded over his forearm, head down, swinging with his stride. Her shirt came untucked to expose a band of smooth white skin. He brought his bad hand over and pushed it down further. Ahhhh. He would get his good hand, the one with feeling, to that when they stopped.

  ‘Wait’ Visco had ordered. We’ll see about ‘wait’. He can wait in chains while we deal with this one. He will die slowly. Play me false. Commander Wiles had done that, set off the charge when he knew I was too close. He is still dying for that. One day I will go in and burn out his eyes then cut his throat. I must remember to thank the old bastard though, for this warning.

  The smell of T4 was something he could never forget, not
since that incident. The sharp, acrid tang of the explosive, like bitter blood, always brought a surge of fear and remembered pain, even if it was only a whiff from an old shell or a munitions case he passed on the plain.

  Crell had smelled it in the vault. It had terrified him. In the rapture of the ritual he thought that it came from the Cross, a message that he had gone too far with his killings. Cringing, already feeling the pain, he waited for his final dismemberment. But it hadn’t come, and slowly he searched out another meaning. So faint. From Visco’s hands! He wanted to cut them off and burn them, but he held off.

  After the ritual he had backtracked the sub-commander. To the Box. Visco had been there while they waited in the vault. He thinks that we serve him. That he is our master. Crell’s nose led him to the grav platform, no scent of T4, but heavy with the odour of drying sealant. He got his tools and lifted the platform floor. Serin had joined him then. At the Box to continue his crazy search. Tired and worn, it would kill him. Crell feared the upper levels almost as much as he feared the explosive, and just as instinctively.

  Serin helped him remove it, a thick rope of plastique laid up under the rim, all the way around the platform. Enough to destroy a transport, let alone a group of men on a work platform. Their handling cracked the sealant and let the scent out. Crell’s eyes went wide. Serin took it away and sealed it in a drum, coiled like a snake.

  I will make him eat it. Stuff it through his guts then blast him to red rain out on the plain. When I am done. When he can’t feel anything else.

  ‘So, it no longer suffices for him to pretend that he assists,’ Serin had said. ‘He plans to remove us, so that all falls to him alone. He has over-reached, and in his excess turns to betrayal.’ Serin pulled Crell to his feet. ‘Do not let it show and tell no one. Tomorrow eve, when we move on the woman, we will take him also. She will be tested. If she fails, she will join him in your shackles. His place there is sure.’